Networking Pt. 2: Professional – In college

It is common knowledge among all those who pay attention to the hype of job searching that networking is important. Various agencies and faculties are at our disposal in order to build our network. This is the second part in a series of entries which will step through the journey I have undergone to build my network. I promised to point out steps along the way where networking opportunities were not utilized. Mostly to please Yupward Girl (the author of HELLO REAL WORLD! A Student’s Approach to Great Internships, Co-ops, and Entry Level Positions), this entry will be concerned with interships and other various methods of gaining workplace experience. I will attempt to explain both their potential and my reasons for not participating in any… until now, of course.

Writing is one of the few practices in life which I consider myself particularly gifted at. I enjoy explaining any number of ideas to whomever will listen, and writing is one of a number of tools which I use in this manner. My ability to write coherently and logically has been repeatedly challenged throughout my educational career, and I believe that the constant criticism has allowed me to practice writing and to bond with this form of communication much more thoroughly than I might have done otherwise. I decided some years ago that I want to write professionally, but the authors I read as a young adult indirectly and accidentally convinced me that I should not depend on writing as my primary source of income. I will discuss this personal decision in private if anyone wishes to know why I feel this way, but in order to fulfill the current purpose I will leave my motives to your imagination.
Since my most clear career path was thus obstructed, a great deal of my late high school and college years was spent pondering what profession I would choose to dedicate the majority of my professional life to. At Baylor, I started as a computer science major. I was drawn because of its practical use of logic, and I left because the early courses were too mundane to match my interest (I have been told a number of times that the higher level courses would have pleased me better). Unfortunately, I was studying computer science during the great layoffs of ’01 and ’02, therefore interships (had I been looking) were hard to come by. My parents both work for technology based companies though, and had I been interested in pursuing a computer science career I am sure I could have utilized their networks to land either an internship or some low level summertime position.
Either of these options would have been very helpful concerning the hypothetical future career search I would have undergone had I continued with my computer science major. As most people have discovered (and I often hear complaints of among fresh graduates) companies will not hire you without experience, but you cannot accumlate experience without getting hired. It is to this point that internships are offered. The company which offers you the position does not need to spend very many resources on you as an intern, and they do not need to risk placing any amount of responsibility on your shoulders. This allows you to see exactly what a live environment is like, and therefore your transition from the classroom to the workplace should be smoother.
In addition to the observation allowed, the majority of internships are offered in order to allow a student to interact with the experienced workers. In this fashion the company can decide whether they want to recruit you as you near graduation. If you get along well with your coworkers and stay on task while you’re in the building, (and if you remind them that you are about to graduate…) there is a good chance that the company you have served as an intern will ask you to join them permanently once you graduate. If you do not succeed in integrating with the work place, there is a good chance they will not recruit you. At least, if the latter is the case, other companies will recognize that you will adapt to their environment more quickly than other cadidates.
Unfortunately, I did change majors, and thus I sacrificed the opportunity to pursue various internships by negating the majority of studying I had completed. Further, my interest in computers slowly gave way to my interest in logic. I changed majors to Great Texts of the Western Tradition, and as one might assume I received many quizzical looks from friends, family, and faculty. I stated earlier that I was interested in computer science for the applied logic; who has ever been more thoroughly logical than the great minds? Was not rhetoric their tool? I personally did not consider the switch that odd.
Any liberal arts degree is open ended concerning the profession the student intends to take, but internships are available to direct the path of these students. I recognized early on that I still had not focused on a career other than writing, and until I made a decision it would obviously be difficult to pursue an internship at all. This problem plagued my progress continually. In an attempt to supplement my lack of workplace experience, I participated in the Baylor in Oxford study abroad program. While impressive and certainly enjoyable, it obviously does not match up as a substitution in the minds of various HR departments. Also, while studying abroad offers the chance to network with other students (as discussed in part one), it limits the ability to network in professional circles. It is exactly this opportunity which is most useful to people who complete internships.
During my junior and senior year, I volunteered for Baylor in a number of ways which provided the opportunity to publicly represent Baylor, but I only served Baylor in this fashion out of an ardent love for the scholastic opportunities they had provided me. I spoke publicly about my major and in a broader scope about the impact of Vision 2012 on the student body. Since my motivation was more out of service than out of gaining experience and since I was not interested in following through with PR as a career, I did not follow up on opportunities to network in these situations.
In addition to all of these oppotunities to network professionally which were missed by my inability to be satisfied with any hypothetical career, it should be mentioned that I did not utilize Baylor’s various methods of providing counseling at all. My career counselor never saw me after my freshman orientation. I did not use my Baylor Interdisciplinary Core counselor for any purpose aside from choosing which period of the required core classes I would register for. My major counselor knew me well as an intellectual, and recognized that I had not focused on either a course of study as it would related to graduate school or on a profession as would be available after graduation. His advice at this point was helpful, but I even decided not to take it after some fair consideration. Therefore, I resisted all of Baylor’s attempts to counsel me and prepare me for the future, and I should be fair to my alma mater is recognizing that fact.
While at college I built a powerful and impressive social network which included a large number of friends, acquaintances, and faculty. However, I either missed or ignored almost every opportunity to build a professional network of coworkers, supervisors, and other various personel.